How a European games festival is putting South Africa's indies on the map.

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"I'm not a game designer. I’m a programmer," says Cukia Kimani, one half of the South African dev team on Semblance, a game that demonstrates what might happen if Super Meat Boy were let loose in a world made of Play-Doh.

In Semblance you move from side to side. Your avatar is a squishy pound of flesh with tears flowing down its face. You can flatten the protagonist from either side—making it thinner or smaller—and you can hammer it against the walls of its environment, creating jump spaces and holes.

You collect orbs, smash your way through barriers, and sneak under spike awnings that send you back to the start screen if you touch them. Semblance feels like a game you should be paying for, but it's not finished. It's on display at "A Maze. / Johannesburg," a South African festival for indie developers and digital artists.

"It was a project for school at the time," says Kimani. "But we realised we could do it for real and so we started a company."

Kimani is talking about NyamaKop Games, the indie development studio he set up with Ben Myers in Johannesburg after the pair connected over a GIF on Twitter. Nyama means "meat" in Swahili, and Kop means "head" in Afrikaans. Make of that what you will.

This is how things are supposed to happen in the indie games scene; someone comes up with an idea and then another person in the same space builds upon it. Indie means underground; it's punk rock.

Punk isn't just anti-establishment; it's also DIY, an ideology that doesn't just run against the grain but is where the standard-bearers happen to be outsiders. Even if they don’t know it—even if they don't fully embrace the ethos—it's a movement that exists through the tightness of its community, a community that exists at society's fringes. And in South Africa, indie games are punk rock.

In Europe, the US, and the rest of the first world, video games are firmly on their way to becoming part of mainstream culture. While the medium still receives the odd kicking in newspapers or on TV, games are now as much a part of the accepted cultural datapack as movies, TV shows, and music for millions of consumers of various ages.

Video games are South Africa's punk

In South Africa, however, video games are still an underground movement. The country has only a handful of gaming publications, the medium has hardly any presence in the mainstream media, and, due to the exchange rate between the rand and most foreign currencies (at the time of this writing it sits at just under R14.50 to the US dollar), hardware and software are prohibitively expensive.

Like every movement, the South African gaming industry has its breakout stars—Cape Town-based studio FreeLives scored a hit with its side-scrolling shooter BroForce, for instance—but for the most part, people who play video games in South Africa are still dismissed by the majority, and the indie game scene isn't even on the radar.

"When I tell people I make video games, they look at me like I'm some sort of magician," says Kimani. "They usually ask me if I work overseas after that."

Local devs know that they mostly have only themselves and one another to rely on for help and inspiration. The community is tight-knit—everyone knows everyone—and many devs wear multiple hats. Someone working as a programmer on one project could be QA testing on another or coding on a third.

"There's a spirit of collaboration," says Israeli/Canadian developer Veve Jaffa, one of the attendees at A Maze. "There's a very nice community that moves away from competition that you see in other communities."

"I think the global indie scene shares that vision, but I feel it's stronger here than, say, in America," she says. "People are very protective of their brand and their aesthetic. Here, it's very transparent, and people are very open to sharing their processes and assets. That's very different from what happens in other countries."

The distance between the country's major cities usually makes collaboration hard, but when A Maze rolls around, the different players in the scene converge on Jo'burg.

A Maze is ground zero in South Africa for indie games, but it's not the only gathering that attracts video game fans and curious onlookers. Jo'burg also plays host to rAge, an event where the local distributors of the games industry's biggest triple-A publishers show off demos for games in the pipeline.

rAge has more in common with an expo like E3 or Gamescom. It's a gamer gathering, sure, but it's also a massive advertising space for the industry's biggest players. The attendees are committed to the cause.

While A Maze is one part game festival, one part art exhibit, and one part popup commune and general party zone, it's also geared toward promoting and celebrating the medium as a whole. The festival has grown from a list of game showcases, presentations, and workshops that occupied one building, into a guerrilla event spreading throughout the technology hub of Braamfontein in downtown Jo'burg.

"A Maze is more about raising awareness than it is selling a product," says Kimani. "You have parties, you have exhibits, and you have talks and workshops. The whole idea of what a game can be and what it takes to make a game starts to form for people who come here—because the games here are not perfect."

"Because they’re not perfect it’s easier to connect with," he says. "If you go to E3 or rAge, the games there will make developing games seem so far out of your reach. If you come to A Maze people realise they can make a small, 10-minute experience that people will connect with."

"Once you have a taste, you’ll keep going—and you will get better at doing this."

It seems odd to me that people who play games in South Africa are such a shunned group. I grew up in Cape Town, we moved to the US when I was 12. I and my entire circle of friends played video games.

Famicom and Genesis were the two we owned, lots of bootleg games on the Famicom. Anyway don't know much about the trend after that but it's weird to think it didn't become mainstream. I guess it seems rather likely that we were just "nerds."

Glad I moved, I avidly play and love programming, seems like that would have been pretty difficult to pursue back home.

In South Africa, however, video games are still an underground movement. The country has only a handful of gaming publications, the medium has hardly any presence in the mainstream media, and, due to the exchange rate between the rand and most foreign currencies (at the time of this writing it sits at just under R14.50 to the US dollar), hardware and software are prohibitively expensive.

Video games are far from "underground" in South Africa - the author might have been misinformed. The 2016 edition of rAge had 33000 visitors and was largely covered on TV and radio. There are countless gaming forums online, gaming shops as well as South African game servers and clans for most popular games - we even use Steam, believe it or not. The article's "angle" feels very wrong.

Games really can be art. It hurts to look at the game industry for anyone who sees that, though. There is so much standing in the way. I have to wonder, however, if it's just an artifact of the genres youth. It's history has been very different from any others, so it's hard to just say 'oh things will change'. Even as games have become totally mainstream, the censorship hasn't weakened any. We still see the ESRB rating games 'M' even though they contain nothing you couldn't do in a PG-13 rated movie. And we still see the gaming audience being enthusiastic in their support of organizations like the ESRB.

We still see government-run agencies like the BBFC and OFLC around the world actively censoring games, with almost no outcry. We see no opposition on the part of consumers to the major console makers sticking by their policy of never permitting AO-rated or even unrated games from booting on their platform (which turns the ESRB ratings system into having the force of law, since making an unlicensed game boot constitutes a violation of federal law under the DMCA).

An event like A Maze gives me hope, though, and South Africas game dev community gives me even more. It makes me think of Times Square in NYC before its neutering and commercialization. Back when theaters took a break from playing porno to play host to experimental filmmakers, where Andy Warhol, Alexander Jodorowsky, and other artists tried out different filmmaking techniques and played them to crowds of prostitutes, junkies, pimps, etc, the air thick with pot smoke. The films they made never gained widespread acceptance, but they were never meant to. What they DID do is inspire a whole generation of young people who went on to do amazing things and to create many of the things we have been enjoying on the silver screen for the past few decades. The heritage of those crazy experiments was a much richer culture a decade later.

Whenever you talk about art and games, there is always a large cadre of gamers who get very worked up and start shouting that they do not want games which make them think, they only want to have fun. And those gamers will always have their Call of Duty and Halo, so they really shouldn't be worried. It's not a choice between either making artistic games that can give you a deeper understanding of what it means to be human and making twitchy reaction-time tests with lots of loud noises and surprises. We haven't stood in the way of Michael Bay cranking out his mindless screen candy just because Michael Haneke or Terrence Mallick are working on something profound.

But without those more artistic entries, the medium as a whole WILL suffer. So even those who aren't interested in playing games that make them think or feel, who just want an adrenaline rush and to see things blow up, should support these sorts of things being made. Unless you literally want it to devolve into one gigantic company producing exactly one title in each standard proscribed genre each year, all of the new interesting touches are going to come either directly from experimental artistic games or from people directly inspired by those.

It seems odd to me that people who play games in South Africa are such a shunned group. I grew up in Cape Town, we moved to the US when I was 12. I and my entire circle of friends played video games.

Famicom and Genesis were the two we owned, lots of bootleg games on the Famicom. Anyway don't know much about the trend after that but it's weird to think it didn't become mainstream. I guess it seems rather likely that we were just "nerds."

Glad I moved, I avidly play and love programming, seems like that would have been pretty difficult to pursue back home.

That's because the article author is singing some serious bullshit with that whole line in the article.

Gaming is NOT underground in South Africa and hasn't been for a long time. Gaming consoles are popular among middle-class people and even lower income folks get in on the gaming scene due to the strong smartphone market here. The PS2 was phenomenally popular here and consoles in general are easily available at all the big box stores (Game, Hi-Fi Corp, Macro, etc, etc)

The PC master race is also doing fairly well in South Africa, although recent price hikes in hardware that are unlinked to the Rand-Dollar exchange rate have hit us hard. The GTX 970 that cost me R5000 last September is now R8000, which is kinda crazy given the Rand didn't suffer any major changes in the intervening year (It was about R14 last year when I bought my 970)

Beyond that, table-top gaming is also present in this country with numerous stores carrying games. Heck, I was in Wordsworth books the other day and they had FFG's Warhammer Quest game for sale. In a mainstream bookstore.

Is gaming in South Africa mainstream in the sense that it gets major news coverage? No, I guess not. But that isn't a surprise considering there are only 5 terrestrial TV channels here.

What we do have is pretty good LTE penetration thanks to the inability of Telkom to deliver fixed line internet at a good price and as a result most people here get their gaming news fix online.

Similarly, Steam is very popular among PC gamers here especially since they started supporting the Rand currency properly as the price of most games dropped compared to the dollar prices we used to pay.

Beyond that, as the article mentions there is rAGE but in addition there are a number of other gaming and electronics related expos that happen here as well.

It is true that game development is not mainstream here. That hasn't changed since the 90s when Toxic Bunny was developed by some South Africans.

But game playing is very much present here and most definitely NOT underground.

On a more general level, software development is a developing industry here in South Africa and as a working developer since 2007 I have never had any issues finding work.

So where can we find more information about the games mentioned in the article?

I know that A Normal Lost Phone released as Replica on Steam, it's very good. I picked it up cheap when it dropped because I tend to keep an eye on the new non-AAA games, never knew it was part of this maker-punky thing in SA. Although this thread makes me slightly doubt if that's quite the case.

Yup, gaming is far from underground here in South Africa, PC gaming is perhaps the slowest moving but even there, there are a number of gaming cafes for those who can't afford their own hardware. Internet access and speed is probably the biggest issue but that is improving.

At UCT* there is a nice game design course (when we're not closed down by the students!) and the South African team regularly win the cluster design competitions in conferences such as the International Supercomputing Conference: http://www.csir.co.za/news/2016/06/CHPC_Cluster.html

Article reads like a generalization of Africa. South Africa is one of the few countries here that takes gaming seriously (events are huge, they get televised etc) but I suppose I can understand the author's take on things.

Personally, really proud of how far SA has come. You want a truly underground game dev experience that truly is akin to a cult punk hideout? Come to Zambia... bet some of you did not even know about this country until this post.

I think being as cut off from the rest of the world is what is affecting this perception - its difficult to participate with gamers in other countries if you have a 300ms ping at the best of times...

Anyway - despite the tones set it the article, I can agree with the bulk of the posters. Every company I've ever worked for has at some point used its network for LANs (albieit with a bit of server isolation) - heck, I even had a boss that specced all the computers accordingly and made sure we had local accounts specifically for gaming...

I've also had to set up a linux-based laptop for my 70ish mother-in-law so that she can play her old windows games using wine... Most of my extended family play at least casual games on their mobile devices - and the kids are mostly into minecraft.

Gaming is really not that underground in SA (as mentioned previously).

It is really nice to see an article giving our local devs some publicity. E.g. Broforce is on steam and is really good, check it out.

As far as Gaming here is concerned, game prices are getting a bit crazy and if the publishers would just drop the prices of game releases here a bit instead of doubling them before release date (Looking at you scumbag EA) we could all afford the games and the market would be much bigger.

Back when I was in high school around 2000, I rewrote "dopewars" as a programming project for my computer science class. My version was set in South African cities and added a bit of the local flavour. Does that count?